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Installing and using the RENKO and Tick Chart plug-ins on Metatrader4

Plug-in installation

To start the installation process download the latest plug-in and follow these steps:

First, open MT4 and make sure that you have enabled DLL imports. This is done in the Expert Advisors tab of the MT4’s Options window (you can press CTRL-O to bring up this window in MT4):

Make sure that you have enabled “Allow DLL imports” as presented on the screen above. “Allow automated trading” can also be enabled, but it is not required for the plug-in to work correctly.

The screen above may look different in various MT4 builds, but the “Allow DLL imports” option is present in all of them.

When finished with the above, you’ll need to close MT4 and run the downloaded renko setup program. When you run the setup program you will see a window similar to the following one:

After clicking [Next > ] and accepting the license agreement, you will need to select the installation folder where Renko bars should be installed. This needs to be your MT4 installation folder (not the /experts, /experts/indicators or any other sub-folder). The installed files will automatically be synchronized with your data folder, so no manual file copying is required.

The illustration above is only an example. You’ll need to select your own MT4 program folder, which is where you installed Metatrader and where terminal.exe is located.

The installation process will begin once you select the destination location, click [ OK ] and pressing [NEXT >].

Once the installation process is complete, you’ll need to activate the software using the “Activate.exe” utility. The activation process is described in the readme file on google drive.

Using the RenkoBarChart plug-in

To use the plug-in, first attach the RenkoBarChart_b574 indicator to a 1M chart of an instrument of your choice (i.e. currency pair, index, etc.). This can do this by dragging the indicator from the Navigator window’s Custom Indicators branch onto the selected M1 chart or by double-clicking the indicator name (RenkoBarChart on the picture below) in the Navigator window.

This action will bring up the following screen, where you can set the plug-in parameters:

This variable influences the renko brick size (candle body), which simply means how many pips in size will each candle body measure. The most common settings here are 10 or 5 pips, but you are free to experiment with your own settings.

This variable reflects the offline chart that is used to output the actual renko chart. Remember that the time period value has no meaning here whatsoever as for as the size or duration of individual renko bricks. It only identifies a unique “canvas”, which will be used to display live renko charts.

You can input any value here as long as you do NOT use the standard MT4 time frames(1,5,15,30,60,240,1440, etc.) and you do not use the same values for other instances of this or any other plug-ins. If you want to set up several different renko charts for a single instrument, you must select a unique OfflineTimeFrame for each one.

These variables enable (when useFirstRenkoOffset set to TRUE) or disable (when useFirstRenkoOffset set to FALSE) the first renko brick’s opening tick value (pip offset), which can be overridden by the value of the FirstRenkoPipOffset variable). This pair of parameters is used to define the starting level of the first renko brick on the chart.

For example, if we have 10 pip renko bars and we set:

UseFirstRenkoPipOffset = true
FirstRenkoPipOffset = 0.0

All bars will open at 0.0 levels (or 00 levels on 5 decimal quotes as presented in the example below):

EURUSD 10 pip renko chart:
...
open 1.40100, close 1.40200
open 1.40200, close 1.40300
open 1.40300, close 1.40400
...etc.

instead of:
…
open 1.40113, close 1.40213
open 1.40213, close 1.40313
open 1.40313, close 1.40413
...

This value defines the type of renko chart to display and can be set to any of the 3 settings described below:

Standard RENKO chart – will set the chart to a standard renko brick chart we’re all accustomed to (just renko bricks with no wicks)

RENKO with wicks – will result in creating a renko chart with visible wicks which will provide more information to the trader than the standard renko bricks do.

RENKO without the opening price shift on reversals – will result in creating a special chart, which may be useful for backtesting EAs.
This chart type provides complete and true price action information as it does not shift the opening price value of reversal bars.

This is an experimental feature designed to lower CPU usage for manual traders, who don’t need to see the charts refresh on each tick (several times per second). The parameter offers the ability to set the update interval in milliseconds. The default value of “0” turns OFF this feature.

This section consists of 3 variables that automatically control the renko candle body size based on the percentage of the daily ATR value:

Use ATR to calculate candle body size (true/false)

ATR period (default value is set to 14)

Percentage of ATR (candle body size) (0.01 to 1)

Once you set the values described above to the desired settings and press the [ OK ] button you will see the following comment in the lower part of the M1 anchor chart:

Now you need to open the generated offline chart (i.e. USDCAD,M3 – as shown in the comment displayed above) to access the LIVE renko chart. To do this go to the File menu in your MT4 terminal and click on the Open Offline menu item:

This will open the Open Offline Chart window, where you’ll need to locate the appropriate chart on the list (USDCAD,M3 in our example) and click [ OPEN ] to access the RENKO chart in your terminal.

The “offline” chart will start displaying live price action as soon as new quotes are received by MT4 and new RENKO bars will be created as they are formed.

Please note that every time the plug-in is attached (or MT4 terminal is restarted) it will recalculate all historical data so keep this in mind when you set the “RenderUsing1MhistoryBars” to 0 (all of history).

Backtesting RENKO

There are two valid ways of backtesting RENKO charts in MT4 – both have been described in separate blog posts:

This variable reflects the offline chart that is used to output the actual tick chart. Remember that the time period value has no meaning here whatsoever as for as the size or duration of individual bars. It only identifies a unique “canvas”, which will be used to display live tick charts.

You can input any value here as long as you do NOT use the standard MT4 time frames(1,5,15,30,60,240,1440, etc.) and you do not use the same values for other instances of this or any other plug-ins.

Next, open the offline chart (i.e. GBPUSD,M3 – as defined in your EA settings) to access the LIVE tick chart. This procedure is described in detail in the “Using the RENKO plug-in” section just above.

TickCharts are built on-the-fly, while new ticks are received by The MT4 terminal. Historical tick charts are not available due to the limitations of the MT4 terminal.

Updating the plug-in to the latest version

The plug-in(s) can be easily updated once new plug-in features or bug fixes are released.
To update your plug-in close your MT4 terminal and run the updater program which will automatically check for newer versions, download the new files and patch your existing plug-in installation. If you have multiple MT4 installations on your system, you should update all instances by using the updateRenkoPlugin.bat file, which is located in your MT4 installation folder.

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Comments

Renko Ea s are freely available in the web for creating renko bar charts.so why should we need to purchase this product ? I think this is the same item available in the web.If not, what is it’s difference apart from other free Ea s.

The offered renko plug-in does not have all of the bugs, which are present in different versions of free renko plug-ins. The chart building algorithm is also more advanced – the plug-in was created using my own concept, so it is not a repackaged version of any of the free plug-ins available to public domain. In addition, the plug-int offers various backtesting capabilities for renko charts.

I created the plug-in for my personal live trading needs, since I was not able to relay on any of the free versions available to me. I use an EA to trade my renko charts, which are running non stop on my VPS, hence they are very well tested and very reliable. You also get full support.